Pierre Gasly and Esteban Ocon failed to reach the final qualifying for the Japanese Grand Prix and recorded a twelfth and fourteenth fastest time. However, Alpine hopes to earn points in the race through strategy.
Pierre Gasly (12th): “Twelfth place is probably our maximum for today. I think the team did a good job restoring the car after a difficult Friday. We could improve this by changing the settings.
The gaps are minimal: I was only 0.050 seconds short of reaching the final. The same story happened in Singapore last week. In a number of previous races we managed to achieve a good result from twelfth place, so the whole battle is still ahead of us.
The team must continue to work hard to improve and return to the top ten in the next stages. Tomorrow will be an interesting race in terms of strategy and tire degradation. We will see what we can do, but our goal is to get another good result.”
Esteban Ocon (14th): “Unfortunately we weren’t fast enough to reach the final today and the gaps were minimal. In any case, we could not make any progress compared to Friday, as we had hoped, which made qualifying difficult.
We are now fully focused on tomorrow’s points race and tire strategy can play a role. We will try to take advantage of this.
In the evening, the team will study all strategy options and choose the one that will allow them to regain positions and earn points.”
Source: F1 News
I am Christopher Clyde, an experienced journalist and content writer with a passion for sports. I have been writing about Formula 1 news for the past five years and am currently employed as an author at athletistic.com, one of the top sports websites in the US.
